Through a colleague of mine, who actually weblogged about this particular piece of news over at his Intranet weblog, I bumped into this specific news article that I thought would be worth while mentioning over here: Storytelling, not Journalism, Spurs More Blogs. In the past you would remember how I have been weblogging a couple of times about the power of storytelling in order to help augment the different Knowledge Management strategies where knowledge workers would have some more powerful means to share knowledge and collaborate with one another through the usage of stories. Well, this particular news item seems to corroborate that exact same thing, but with a slight twist: sharing stories through the usage of weblogs. Indeed, according to the article, based on a PEW report, it looks like plenty of U.S. (I am sure it would apply worldwide as well) webloggers do actually get to weblog because they want to share stories with others as opposed to just become journalists, which, in principle, would come to explain why there doesn’t seem to be too many professional webloggers but plenty of amateur ones who just do weblogging as a hobby or to help them connect with their readership through the sharing of those stories because they want to share their passion about a particular topic with everyone else.
This is certainly quite fascinating because thinking about how distributed the business world is getting at this very moment, where a huge chunk of the workforce is rather mobile or working remotely, it sounds like weblogs would fit in quite nicely within a KM strategy to help folks share knowledge and collaborate with one another in a medium that not only do they feel comfortable with but that it encourages them to share. Yes, through that same storytelling. We all love telling stories, don’t we? Thus whoever thought that weblogs did not have a space within a KM strategy should think about it again and read through that article, as an example. In fact, there is also plenty of really interesting information about the report regarding the demographics of the group of webloggers, but in particular there was one item that caught my attention as well.
According to the PEW report,
“Eighty-two percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. Three percent say they have quit.“
82% of webloggers saying that they would still be weblogging in a year’s time. And only 3% would have quit altogether. Goodness ! That is huge ! Can you imagine the incredible amount of knowledge that would be put together by a bunch of webloggers sharing their stories? Can you imagine when that is turned from a business perspective and you get a good chunk of your knowledge workers to weblog for about a year and still being strong at it. The incredible amount of information shared. The enormous amount of different connections put in place because of those webloggers have decided to stick around and connect with others. Mind-blowing. And then from there we have got to see the ones who will stick to it longer than that period of time.
As I said, whoever is out there thinking about shaping up their existing KM strategies. or creating new ones, would probably need to think about it twice before venturing into not providing a weblogging platform as part of the tools suite in place to get knowledge workers closer to one another in order to help them share their knowledge and collaborate, because evidence shows that, if anything, weblogs provide just that perfect platform to help people share what they know with others and build further up into those different relationships.
Tags: Storytelling, Telling Stories, Metablogging, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Networking, Weblogs, PEW
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